Illustrator - Minimum stroke weight

[scottm55188995]

Hi there,

Most of the publishers I work with require a minimum stroke weight of 0.25 pt for their printed books. It is not uncommon to have the supplied .ai files trigger the minimum stroke weight preflight warning in InDesign. Is there a way I can select and change strokes under 0.25 pt in Illustrator?

The placing of a raster version to avoid the preflight warning is not ideal. 

Thanks for your help.

Scott

[Kurt Gold · Accepted solution]

You may draw a stroke and set its weight to 0,125 pt. In the Magic Wand palette enable the Stroke Weight option and set the tolerance to 0,124 pt.

Take the Magic Wand tool and click on the 0,125 pt stroke.

A preflight in Acrobat is probably still the better option.

[Luke Jennings3 · Accepted solution]

I'm not sure if there is an Ilustrator fix for you, but if the placed .ai file is enlarged or reduced in InDesign, the effective stroke width will change (unless the InDesign preference to include stroke width when scaling is turned off). The Acrobat Print production tool Fix hairlines can find lines smaller than .25 pt and change them to .25 pt.

You could also use a Preflight Fixup.

[Ton Frederiks]

Or use a script to select these stroked lines:

https://github.com/nvkelso/illustrator-scripts/blob/master/other-authors/jwundes/SelectPathsBySize.j...

Here you can find the better version of SelectPathsBySize.jsx :

https://github.com/johnwun/js4ai/zipball/master

[Kurt Gold]

Did you perhaps mean a different script, Ton?

I don't see how the SelectPathsBySize script may help in that case. Am I overlooking something?

[Ton Frederiks]

You can choose the stroke width in the script.

[Monika Gause · Accepted solution]

It's possible with the plugin ToolShed.

It can adjust all paths to a certain minimum stroke width.

https://rj-graffix.com/downloads/plugins/#toolshed

[Kurt Gold]

Thanks, Ton. When I execute the script the (not resizeable) dialog only goes up to "He..." (which probably means "Height").

The "Str..." entry as per your screenshot is not visible and cannot be accessed. Therefore my question.

[Ton Frederiks]

I see, I had the script as part of a collection, but it behaves different (although the dialog box is not resizable) than the one I linked to.

Here you can find the better version of SelectPathsBySize.jsx :

https://github.com/johnwun/js4ai/zipball/master

[Kurt Gold]

Thanks again, Ton. I haven't tried the "new" script yet, but I trust your recommendation.

The script is pretty entertaining, by the way. One by one.

Sometimes I think it is a pity that Illustrator's Magic Wand capabilities have not been improved for decades.

[Ton Frederiks]

Yes, Kurt. There are many tools that can be improved (Graphs maybe? or Freeform Gradients debugged?) 

There are a lot of useful scripts all over the Internet, but the most recent scripts that are installed by Illustrator are 10 years old.